Marin Voice: Reducing vast number of school districts would improve equity

In 2018, a state review of Sausalito Marin City School District prompted California’s first desegregation order in 50 years, causing the district to unify into one school.

The review found the district had “cut critical classroom programming” at Bayside-Martin Luther King Academy (primarily students of color) “while guaranteeing stable funding for Willow Creek Academy” (primarily White students).

However, that district’s small boundaries certainly do not contain the extent of Marin’s segregation issues. Rather, it models a problem (and rectifying step) relevant on a larger scale to all of Marin’s 17 districts.

This sheer number of districts alone effectively enforces legal, economic and social segregation in the county. Marin’s many school districts are highly subdivided and disjointedly arranged so children and resources come in contact only with those deemed alike.

In many instances, Marin’s school district divisions make seemingly confusing geographical turns and jumps to exclude those who are, by geographical proximity, within their own community, but by race and economic status are different from them.

The two wealthiest towns of Tiburon and Ross are somehow both drawn together into Redwood High School in Larkspur, despite both being closer to other schools, and far from each other. Notably, Tiburon students bypass their neighbors in Marin City at Tamalpais High.

In San Rafael’s two elementary school districts, Miller Creek is ranked 94th in achievement in California and San Rafael City is 318 spots lower, at 412th. US News reports that Miller Creek’s schools have a median of 39% students of color and of 12% economically disadvantaged students. San Rafael City’s schools have a median of 94% students of color and of 80% economically disadvantaged students. Quality corresponds to racial composition, and across every school, race and economic advantage directly correspond.

Instead of Marin’s school budgets being allocated out of a few larger pools, families and their resources are highly isolated in tiny districts drawn among racial and economic lines.

Marin residents must reconcile whether they believe rich families have more entitlement than a poor family to benefit from another rich family’s property tax contributions. That is the antithesis of a public resources’ purpose – everyone proportionally gives to facilitate the development of communal goods.

County administrators cannot cater to those who feel entitled to commandeer a resource provided to be equally accessible and restrict it, not through tuition fees but through property values, to people who can afford to match their contribution.

To argue your right to share public resources with only people who are like you is to explicitly defend the practice of segregation. Yet our current districting system is facilitating just that.

This public school pitfall isn’t unique to Marin, but the shocking scale at which it’s practiced here certainly is. The specificity and division of Marin’s district boundaries is shamefully stark when compared to the singular district of neighboring San Francisco. There, one district holds 51,790 students and 114 schools, while Marin’s 17 districts split only 30,811 students and range in composition from merely one to 11 schools each.

Not only are our district lines obvious institutional racism, which Marin claims to abhor, but funding 17 sets of administration is a logistical and financial nightmare. While some of the rural areas of West Marin could validly claim distinction, there is no reason why the rest of Central Marin should have more than one or two districts.

Fortunately, it’s entirely possible for Marin residents to change this. District mergers are easily authorized directly by citizens. A petition by 25% of registered voters in affected areas can be sent to the Marin County Committee on School District Organization, composed of 11 members appointed by publicly elected school trustees from each of Marin’s five supervisorial districts. After 120 days, they can either approve it or deny it, in which case citizens can appeal directly to the state.

Merging districts doesn’t restrict individual school’s administration’s control over policies and approaches, but does offer legal authority to monitor the quality between schools and distribute resources appropriately.

As we’ve seen in Sausalito Marin City, even within districts, we must still enforce that budgets are split equitably. But without funds disbursed from a unified district, it’s structurally ensured that they can never be.

Loughlin Browne, of Corte Madera, is an alumnus of Marin’s public elementary, middle and high schools. She is a sophomore at Columbia University.